Thursday, April 14, 2011

Annual Rankings Focus on County Health

This year's County Health Rankings allow people in more than 3,000 US counties and the District of Columbia to compare the overall health of their counties against other counties in their state, and also compare their performance on specific health factors against national benchmarks of top-performing counties.

Published by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the rankings help counties understand what factors influence the health of their residents and how long they will live. Based on the latest data available for each county, the rankings Web site is the only tool of its kind that measures the overall health of each county in all 50 states on the multiple factors that influence health, says RWJF. The site includes snapshots of nearly every county with a color-coded map that compares each county’s overall health with other counties in each of the 50 states. People can compare how their county is doing in areas such as diabetes screening rates and number of uninsured adults to national benchmarks.